Full of sound and furry

Pre-Keynote Rumor Roundup

The Wall Street Journal is now in on the iTunes movie rentals rumor. This one strikes the Macalope as having a high probability of being true. As was discussed on last week’s MacBreak Weekly, video rentals are really one of the ways Apple can make a compelling proposition out of the Apple TV.

The Macalope gives this one six out of six antler points.

He’s less sanguine about the Safari on Windows rumor (tip o’ the antlers to Daring Fireball). Sure, there’s the “gateway app” philosophy that says the way Apple makes inroads to Windows users is to offer them cool apps to show them what they’re missing on OS X.

But a browser? Seems to the horny one that most of the hot action in the browser goes on in WebKit, not Safari. Meanwhile, Firefox has already established itself as the “not IE” browser for Windows including all those sarcastic “Get a real browser!” reminders. Also, based on what the Macalope’s hairy ears have picked up about the relative stability of running iTunes on Windows, he’s not so sure the “gateway app” philosophy is as sound as you might think.

But assuming Apple has ironed out its Windows development issues, then are there really any other apps the company has that it could/would/should port? You don’t want to to give away the farm by porting iLife and you don’t just want to hit a small segment of the market by porting a professional app like Aperture.

Three out of six antler points.

Neither really seems like a great announcement for WWDC. But, then, they could just be bubbling to the surface because of WWDC and might only get announced later.

IMO Apple always thinks 3 steps ahead (just see how they started with a basic iPod and how they now come full circle with a video iPod and Apple TV, with iTunes as the central server). So think ahead. Think web-services (maybe using features specific to Safari 3 or Later on 4) and even next-gen webservices.

other reasons may be:
– gateway app. (Fastest browser, just think what they can do with a “real” OS when all is integrated… )
– developer tool for iPhone
Both of these of course were already mentioned above.

Safari Everywhere t’aint a bad strategy (even tho’ I’m perfectly happy with the Fox and its ever-growing coterie of cool add-ins like CoolIris, Googlepedia, FoxMarks and Flashblock), and although I keep hearing the disses, my experience on iTunes for Win on multiple computers is not a hair’s breadth different than on my Mac, no less stable, functional or harder to use once you find where the pref’s are. In fact iTunes for Win pretty much led to my choosing to switch.

Ironically, however, the lesson I could’ve learned is how OS platforms are becoming relatively less important as all evolve and reverse engineer each other.

Still I haven’t rebooted this guy (my iBook) in about 3 months and it’s still chugging along which I definitely can’t say about Windows.

In the department of applications Apple could port to Windows as “gateway” apps to attract switchers, I used to think that they could easily sell an iChat / iSight combo. The biggest downside to all of iChat’s AV goodness is that the vast majority of people aren’t using iChat at all, greatly limiting the number of potential chat partners. Making a Windows version of the most robust consumer-level chat software anybody has come up with would be a dream come true to begin with, but coupling it with an iSight — arguably one of the better consumer-level webcams around — in order for it to pay for itself, I think, would have been a real winner.

When the iPod first came out, it was supposedly the first of many peripherals that Apple was working on. Unfortunately all we’ve seen are more iPods, one iSight, and soon, the iPhone. I think there is a lot of room for Apple to be innovating in areas like cameras, specialty photo printers, and so forth. HP has a pretty slick array of such items — not all of them are as good as an Apple versino would be, but they are clearly some nifty niche peripherals.

Not sure what other pure Apple software I think is ripe for a Windows version, by itself and not coupled with hardware.